I thought that title might get your attention.
I have a very good family friend who has been the primary influence of my home theater sickness. He is a hard-core audiophile, and has been so for most of his life. This guy has lovely custom re-engineered ADCOM and Rotel amps lying around in his basement. Needless to say, he's spent decades on both his home theater room and his 2-channel room, and recently moved to a new home (specifically because it had better acoustics than his old one
). He recently invited my wife and I over for an afternoon of wine and music. What I heard was nothing short of awe-inspiring. We spend a lot of time talking about soundstage, presence, depth, etc. It's hard to really grasp those concepts without really hearing them.
I can't go into the details of his setup, simply because I don't remember all of it. What I do know is that it's a 2-channel setup, enormous 2 channel amp (130lbs, I believe he said), line conditioners, CD player with seperate D/A converter, suspended wiring with speaker cables as large as garden hoses, everything on anti-resonance feet, speaker stands bolted to the floor, etc. No TV's, no subs, just an acoustically lovely room, drawers full of CD's and vinyl, a rack of equipment, and two goregously massive B&W 801 speakers.
I now understand that two channel stereo is absolutely capable of three dimensional imaging. I have never heard an orchestra sound so real, so detailed, and so dimensional. I could plainly pinpoint precisely where various members of the orchestra were seated, left-to-right, and front-to-back. Oh god the detail - a couple of jazz tracks that involved a drum and brush, I'm pretty sure I could count the hairs on the brush if I had wanted to. Norah Jones, Diana Krall, Mary Black - they're right there standing in the room. Awe inspiring. This is what this hobby is all about! We listened to about 4 hours of music, and then spent some time playing around with some specific demo CD's to highlight the soundstage and dimensionality of the system. I was blown away at how much those speakers absolutely dissapeared into the soundstage and created a totallly 3 dimensional environment. Who needs DPL II processing and 8 speakers?
So here's the deal. I brought along several of my 'reference' albums. Music that I know and love for both the musical content and the technical aspects of the recordings. My little setup doesn't really sound half bad compared to his monster setup. There are obviously huge differences in the presence and detail, but really, truly, I'm pretty impressed at how my stuff sounds. Until it comes to soundstage.
I want that glorious 3- dimensionality from 2 channels. I spent an hour or so tweaking the placement of the m22's over the weekend, and I did improve the soundstage a bit, but not enough. Building such a system is a long (and expensive) road, but where should I start? I just bought the SVS sub, and that has gone a *long* way at balancing out my system. But what's next? Like most of us, I can't just whip out the Amex card and spend $50K+ on a system, so this needs to be a gradual thing over years. Should I start down the path of discrete amplifiers? Upgrade to M60/M80's? Invest in better wiring? Just curious about some of your thoughts.
Thanks friends!
